NASA Mars Research Helps Find Buried Water on Earth
A NASA-led team has used radar sounding technology developed to explore the subsurface of Mars to create high-resolution maps of freshwater aquifers buried deep beneath an Earth desert, in the first use of airborne sounding radar for aquifer mapping. The research may help scientists better locate and map Earth's desert aquifers, understand current and past hydrological conditions in Earth's deserts and assess how climate change is impacting them. Deserts cover roughly 20 percent of Earth's land surface, including highly populated regions in the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, west and central Asia and the southwestern United States. Read more
Nasa satellites have weighed the water lost by the US State of California's heartland since 2003. The Sacramento and San Joaquin River Basins which support the highly productive Central Valley have shed over 30 cubic km of water in that time. The data comes from the Grace mission which detects changes in gravity caused by water as it cycles between the sea, the atmosphere and the land. Read more